by Nick Hornby
“I suppose.”
“Well, there you are then. It comes in at number five in your list of dream jobs, and as the other four are entirely impractical, you’re better off where you are.”
I don’t tell Dick and Barry that I’m thinking of packing it in. But I do ask them for their five dream jobs.
“Are you allowed to subdivide?” Barry asks.
“How d’you mean?”
“Like, does saxophonist and pianist count as two jobs?”
“I should think so.”
There’s silence in the shop; for a few moments it has become a primary school classroom during a quiet drawing period. Bics are sucked, crossings out are made, brows are furrowed, and I look over shoulders.
“And what about bass guitarist and lead guitarist?”
“I don’t know. Just the one, I should think.”
“What, so Keith Richards had the same job as Bill Wyman, according to you?”
“I didn’t say they’ve got…”
“Someone should have told them that. One of them could have saved himself a lot of trouble.”
“What about, say, film reviewer and album reviewer?” says Dick.
“One job.”
“Brilliant. That frees me up for other things.”
“Oh yeah? Like?”
“Pianist and saxophonist, for a start. And I’ve still got two places left.”
And so on, and on. But the point is, my own list wasn’t freakish. It could have been made by anybody. Just about anybody. Anybody who works here, anyway. Nobody asks how to spell “solicitor.” Nobody wants to know whether “vet” and “doctor” count as two choices. Both of them are lost, away, off in recording studios and dressing rooms and Holiday Inn bars.
THIRTY-ONE
LAURA and I go to see my mum and dad, and it feels sort of official, like we’re announcing something. I think that feeling comes from them rather than from us. My mum’s wearing a dress, and my dad doesn’t buzz around doing things to his stupid and vile homemade wine, and nor does he reach for the TV remote control; he sits down in a chair and listens and asks questions, and in a dim light he would resemble an ordinary human being having a conversation with guests.
It’s easier to have parents if you’ve got a girlfriend. I don’t know why this is true, but it is. My mum and dad like me more when I have someone, and they seem more comfortable; it’s as if Laura becomes a sort of human microphone, somebody we speak into to make ourselves heard.
“Have you been watching Inspector Morse?” Laura asks, apropos of nothing.
“No,” says my dad. “They’re repeats, aren’t they? We’ve got them on video from the first time around.” See, this is typical of my dad. It’s not enough for him to say that he never watches repeats, that he’s the first on the block; he has to add an unnecessary and mendacious embellishment.
“You didn’t have a VCR the first time around,” I point out, not unreasonably. My dad pretends he hasn’t heard.
“What did you say that for?” I ask him. He winks at Laura, as if she’s in on a particularly impenetrable family joke. She smiles back. Whose family is it, anyway?
“You can buy them in the shops,” he says. “Ready-made ones.”
“I know that. But you haven’t got any, have you?”
My dad pretends he hasn’t heard and, at this point, if it had been just the three of us, we would have had a row. I would have told him that he was mental and/or a liar; my mother would have told me not to make mountains out of molehills, etc., and I would have asked her whether she had to listen to this stuff all day, and we would have taken it on from there.
When Laura’s here, though…I wouldn’t go so far as to say she actively likes my parents, but she certainly thinks that parents generally are a good thing, and that therefore their little quirks and idiocies are there to be loved, not exposed. She treats my father’s fibs and boasts and non sequiturs as waves, giant breakers, and she surfs over them with skill and pleasure.
“They’re really expensive, though, aren’t they, those ready-made ones?” she says. “I bought Rob a couple of things on video for his birthday a few years ago, and they came to nearly twenty-five pounds!”
This is shameless stuff. She doesn’t think twenty-five pounds is a lot of money, but she knows they will, and my mum duly gives a loud, terrified, twenty-five-quid shriek. And then we’re off onto the prices of things—chocolates, houses, anything we can think of, really—and my dad’s outrageous lies are forgotten.
And while we’re washing up, more or less the same thing happens with my mum.
“I’m glad you’re back to sort him out,” she says. “God knows what the flat would look like if he had to look after himself.”
This really fucks me off, a) because I’d told her not to mention Laura’s recent absence, b) because you don’t tell any woman, but especially not Laura, that one of her major talents is looking after me, and c) I’m the tidier one of the two of us, and the flat was actually cleaner during her absence.
“I didn’t know you’d been letting yourself in to examine the state of our kitchen, Mum.”
“I don’t need to, thanks all the same. I know what you’re like.”
“You knew what I was like when I was eighteen. You don’t know what I’m like now, bad luck.” Where did that “bad luck”—childish, taunting, petulant—come from? Oh, I know where, really. It came from straight out of 1973.
“He’s much tidier than me,” says Laura, simply and gravely. I’ve heard this sentence about ten times, with exactly the same intonation, ever since I was forced to bring Laura here for the first time.
“Oh, he’s a good lad, really. I just wish he’d sort himself out.”
“He will.” And they both look at me fondly. So, yes, I’ve been rubbished and patronized and worried over, but there’s a glow in the kitchen now, genuine three-way affection, where previously there might have been simply mutual antagonism, ending with my mum’s tears and me slamming the door. I do prefer it this way, really; I’m happy Laura’s here.
THIRTY-TWO
FLY posters. I’m for them. The only creative idea I have ever had in my life was for an exhibition of fly poster photographs. It would take two or three decades to get enough stuff, but it would look really good when it was finished. There are important historical documents on the window of the boarded-up shop opposite mine: posters advertising a Frank Bruno fight, and an Anti-Nazi rally, and the new Prince single, and a West Indian comedian, and loads of gigs, and in a couple of weeks they will be gone, covered over by the shifting sands of time—or at least, an advert for the new U2 album. You get a sense of the spirit of the age, right? (I’ll let you into a secret: I actually started on the project. In 1988 I took about three pictures on my Instamatic of an empty shop on the Holloway Road, but then they let the shop, and I kind of lost enthusiasm. The photos came out OK—OKish, anyway—but no one’s going to let you exhibit three photos, are they?)
Anyway, every now and then I test myself: I stare at the shopfront to make sure that I’ve heard of the bands with gigs coming up, but the sad truth is that I’m losing touch. I used to know everyone, every single name, however stupid, whatever the size of the venue the band was playing. And then, three or four years ago, when I stopped devouring every single word in the music papers, I began to notice that I no longer recognized the names playing some of the pubs and smaller clubs; last year, there were a couple of bands playing at the Forum who meant absolutely nothing to me. The Forum! A fifteen-hundred-capacity venue! One thousand five hundred people going to see a band I’d never heard of! The first time it happened I was depressed for the entire evening, probably because I made the mistake of confessing my ignorance to Dick and Barry. (Barry almost exploded with derision; Dick stared into his drink, too embarrassed for me even to meet my eye.)
Anyway, again. I’m doing my spot-check (Prince is there, at least, so I don’t score nul points—one day I’m going to score nul points, and then I’ll ha
ng myself) and I notice a familiar-looking poster. “BY POPULAR DEMAND!” it says. “THE RETURN OF THE GROUCHO CLUB!” And then, underneath, “EVERY FRIDAY FROM 20TH JULY, THE DOG AND PHEASANT.” I stand there looking at it for ages, with my mouth open. It’s the same size and color as ours used to be, and they’ve even had the cheek to copy our design and our logo—the Groucho Marx glasses and moustache in the second “o” of “Groucho,” and the cigar coming out of the bumcrack (that’s probably not the correct technical term, but that’s what we used to call it) in the “b” at the end of “club.”
On our old posters, there used to be a line at the bottom listing the type of music I played; I used to stick the name of the brilliant, gifted DJ at the end, in the doomed hope of creating a cult following for him. You can’t see the bottom of this one because some band has plastered a load of little flyers over it; so I peel them off, and there it is: “STAX ATLANTIC MOTOWN R&B SKA MERSEYBEAT AND THE OCCASIONAL MADONNA SINGLE—DANCE MUSIC FOR OLD PEOPLE—DJ ROB FLEMING.” It’s nice to see I’m still doing it after all these years.
What’s going on? There are only three possibilities, really: (a) this poster has been there since 1986, and fly poster archaeologists have just discovered it; (b) I decided to restart the club, got the posters done, put them up, and then suffered a pretty comprehensive attack of amnesia; (c) someone else has decided to restart the club for me. I reckon that explanation “c” is the best bet, and go home to wait for Laura.
“It’s a late birthday present. I had the idea when I was living with Ray, and it was such a good one that I was really annoyed that we weren’t together anymore. Maybe that’s why I came back. Are you pleased?” she says. She’s been out with a couple of people for a drink after work, and she’s a bit squiffy.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but I am pleased. Nervous and daunted—all those records to dig out, all that equipment to get hold of—but pleased. Thrilled, really.
“You had no right,” I tell her. “Supposing…” What? “Supposing I was doing something that couldn’t be canceled?”
“What do you ever do that can’t be canceled?”
“That’s not the point.” I don’t know why I have to be like this, all stern and sulky and what-business-is-it-of-yours. I should be bursting into tears of love and gratitude, not sulking.
She sighs, slumps back on the sofa, and kicks her shoes off.
“Well, tough. You’re doing it.”
“Maybe.”
One day, when something like this happens, I’m just going to go, thanks, that’s great, how thoughtful, I’m really looking forward to it. Not yet, though.
“You know we’re doing a set in the middle?” says Barry.
“Like fuck you are.”
“Laura said we could. If I helped out with the posters and all that.”
“Jesus. You’re not going to take her up on it?”
“’Course we are.”
“I’ll give you ten percent of the door if you don’t play.”
“We’re getting that anyway.”
“What’s she fucking playing at? OK, twenty percent.”
“No. We need the gig.”
“One hundred and ten percent. That’s my final offer.”
He laughs.
“I’m not kidding. If we get one hundred people paying a fiver a throw, I’ll give you five hundred and fifty pounds. That’s how much it means to me not to hear you play.”
“We’re not as bad as you think, Rob.”
“You couldn’t be. Look, Barry. There’s going to be people from Laura’s work there, people who own dogs and babies and Tina Turner albums. How are you going to cope with them?”
“How are they going to cope with us, more like. We’re not called Barrytown anymore, by the way. They got sick of the Barry/Barrytown thing. We’re called SDM. Sonic Death Monkey.”
“‘Sonic Death Monkey.’”
“What do you think? Dick likes it.”
“Barry, you’re over thirty years old. You owe it to yourself and to your friends and to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.”
“I owe it to myself to go out on the edge, Rob, and this group really does go out on the edge. Over it, in fact.”
“You’ll be going fucking right over it if you come anywhere near me next Friday night.”
“That’s what we want. Reaction. And if Laura’s bourgeois lawyer friends can’t take it, then fuck ’em. Let ’em riot, we can handle it. We’ll be ready.” He gives what he fondly imagines to be a demonic, drug-crazed chuckle.
Some people would relish all this. They’d make an anecdote out of it, they’d be getting the phrasing right in their heads even as the pub was being torn apart, even as weeping lawyers with bleeding eardrums were heading for the exits. I am not one of those people. I just gather it all up into a hard ball of nervous anxiety and put it in my gut, somewhere between the belly button and the arsehole, for safe keeping. Even Laura doesn’t seem to be that worried.
“It’s only the first one. And I’ve told them they can’t go on for longer than half an hour. And OK, you might lose a couple of my friends, but they won’t be able to get baby-sitters every week, anyway.”
“I’ve got to pay a deposit, you know. As well as the rental on the room.”
“That’s all taken care of.”
And just that one little sentence sets something off in me. I suddenly feel choked up. It’s not the money, it’s the way she’s thought of everything: one morning I woke up to find her going through my singles, pulling out things that she remembered me playing and putting them into the little carrying cases that I used to use and put away in a cupboard somewhere years ago. She knew I needed a kick up the backside. She also knew how happy I was when I used to do this; and from whichever angle I examine it, it still looks as though she’s done it because she loves me.
I cave in to something that has been eating away at me for a while, and put my arms around her.
“I’m sorry I’ve been a bit of a jerk. I do appreciate what you’ve done for me, and I know you’ve done it for the best possible reasons, and I do love you, even though I act as though I don’t.”
“That’s OK. You seem so cross all the time, though.”
“I know. I don’t get myself.”
But if I had to take a wild guess, I’d say that I’m cross because I know I’m stuck, and I don’t like it. It would be nicer, in some ways, if I wasn’t so bound to her; it would be nicer if those sweet possibilities, that dreamy anticipation you have when you’re fifteen or twenty or twenty-five, even, and you know that the most perfect person in the world might walk into your shop or office or friend’s party at any moment…it would be nicer if all that were still around somewhere, in a back pocket or a bottom drawer. But it’s all gone, I think, and that’s enough to make anyone cross. Laura is who I am now, and it’s no good pretending otherwise.
THIRTY-THREE
I MEET Caroline when she comes to interview me for her newspaper, and I fall for her straightaway, no messing, while she’s at the bar in the pub waiting to buy me a drink. It’s a hot day, the first of the year—we go and sit at a trestle table outside and watch the traffic—and she’s pink cheeked and wearing a sleeveless, shapeless summer dress with clumpy boots, and for some reason the outfit looks really good on her. But I think I would have gone for anyone today. The weather makes me feel as though I’ve lost all the dead nerve-ends that were stopping me from feeling and, anyway, how can you fail to fall in love with someone who wants to interview you for a newspaper?
She writes for the Tufnell Parker, one of those free magazines full of advertisements that people shove through your door and you shove into the rubbish bin. Actually, she’s a student—she’s doing a journalism course, and she’s on work experience. And, actually, she says her editor isn’t sure whether he’ll want the piece, because he’s never heard of the shop or the club, and Holloway is right on the borderline of his parish, or constituency, or catchment a
rea, or whatever it is. But Caroline used to come to the club in the old days, and loved it, and wanted to give us a plug.
“I shouldn’t have let you in,” I say. “You must only have been about sixteen.”
“Dear me,” she says, and I can’t see why until I think about what I’ve just said. I didn’t mean it as a pathetic chat-up line, or indeed any sort of a chat-up line; I just meant that if she’s a student now, she must have been at school then, even though she looks as though she’s in her late twenties or early thirties. When I find out that she’s a mature student and she worked as a secretary for some left-wing publishing company, I try to correct the impression I must have given without whiting it out altogether, if you see what I mean, and I make a bit of a hash of it.
“When I said that thing about not letting you in, I didn’t mean you look young. You don’t.” Jesus. “You don’t look old, either. You just look as old as you are.” Fucking hell. What if she’s forty-five? “Well, you do. A bit younger, maybe, but not a lot. Not too much. Just right. I’d forgotten about mature students, you see.” I’d rather be a smoothy slimeball than a blundering, semi-coherent, gushing twit any day of the week.
Within minutes, however, I’m looking back fondly on those gushing twit days; they seem infinitely preferable to my next incarnation, Sleaze Man.
“You must have an enormous record collection,” Caroline says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Do you want to come round and see it?”
I meant it! I meant it! I thought maybe they’d want a picture of me standing by it or something! But when Caroline looks at me over the top of her sunglasses, I rewind and listen to what I said, and let out an audible groan of despair. At least that makes her laugh.
“I’m not usually like this, honest.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t think he’ll let me do one of those Guardian-type profiles, anyway.”
“That wasn’t why I was worried.”